My newest portray, The Citadel (v. Nardo), didn’t start merely on canvas. It started as a whisper – a picture handed digitally between nameless fingers, reposted, remixed, archived, and mythologized throughout the web. Like lots of my works, this piece builds from historic fragments and symbols, grounded within the perception that memes should not fleeting – they’re foundational. They don’t simply replicate tradition, relatively, they write it.
Final 12 months in 2024, I introduced a solo present in Abu Dhabi centered round the truth that Subway – the sandwich chain – was one of many first quick meals eating places to just accept Bitcoin. That small historic element turned the seed of a bigger conceptual inquiry: what does it imply to “eat” in an age of hyper-speed info? The works explored the overlap between quick meals, memes, and digital consideration. The exhibition was tight, exact, and deeply memetic in its construction.
The Citadel got here from an identical place.
In 2013, a now-legendary Reddit submit titled “I’m a time-traveler from the longer term, right here to beg you to cease what you might be doing” appeared on-line. The writer – claiming to be from 2025 – warned of a future formed by Bitcoin, however not in the best way many had hoped. It wasn’t a utopia. It was a stratified society the place those that adopted early turned untouchably wealthy, and everybody else was left behind. Whether or not satire, fiction, or real warning, the submit struck a nerve. It unfold rapidly. It turned a part of the cultural and memetic structure of Bitcoin.
Years later, one other nameless consumer gave that warning a visible kind. The Citadel v.1, doubtless created on 4chan, featured an enormous tower cobbled collectively from borrowed imagery – most notably a background ripped from Alexander Mikhalchyk’s oil portray Tower of Babel. Crimson – overlaid with iconic web figures like Pepe, Wojak, and the Bogdanoff twins. It was chaotic, humorous, ominous. And it caught hearth. Variations unfold throughout boards. Variants emerged for Monero, Ethereum, and different Bitcoin-based class hierarchies. An entire mythology took form round it.
I couldn’t cease interested by that picture. The symbolism. The verticality. The warning. It wasn’t only a meme – it was a map. A visible schema of energy and perception, advised within the language of the web. And but, it had by no means been bodily painted. By no means given the burden or permanence it deserved. That’s after I determined to create what I consider is the primary absolutely hand-painted oil model of the Bitcoin Citadel meme.
The Citadel (v. Nardo) is 7 ft broad, 5 ft tall, and completely rendered in oil by hand over six months. The tower in my portray is authentic – constructed from references to Bruegel’s depictions of Babel. The superimposed depictions of Pepe, the monk, the nobleman, even Jesus, are deliberate nods to the v.1 model, reimagined and built-in with painterly care. Nothing right here is copy-pasted. Each inch is constructed to really feel mythic, monumental, and true to the burden of the meme itself.
Like all my work, it’s meant to evoke grandeur, drama, and symbolic density. It’s meant to really feel like a relic from a future previous – one thing dug up from the ruins of digital civilization. My late professor as soon as advised me that the perfect artwork is each folkloric and provocative. That line by no means left me.
And that’s basically what web memes are. They’re trendy folklore. They encode perception, id, warning, and aspiration in compressed symbols. They might begin as jokes – however jokes have all the time been a supply system for deeper fact. Memes don’t simply survive on-line; they form what we anticipate from actuality.
The Citadel (v. Nardo) might be bought at public sale by way of Scarce.Metropolis and debut on the Bitcoin Convention in Las Vegas – the biggest gathering of Bitcoiners on this planet. It’s not only a portray. It’s a response. A reckoning. A reminder.As a result of in the long run, as I all the time say: you change into what you meme.
This can be a visitor submit by X-Nardo Opinions expressed are totally their very own and don’t essentially replicate these of BTC, Inc. or Bitcoin Journal.